October 16, 2003
IBM employees knew the company was producing hard drives -- dubbed the "DeathStar" by some users -- with a failure rate much higher than normal, according to documents introduced in a California class action case.
"Do you mean to tell me we're shipping drives for distribution with ... defects of 17 percent?" one unidentified employee asks another in an e-mail, according to a transcript of an August court hearing in which the message was read, Bloomberg News reported.
The California case was filed in Alameda County Superior Court in 2001 by six consumers who accused the company of knowingly selling IBM DeskStar drives with an unusually high failure rate while concealing that information from consumers.
A similar case is pending in Texas, where a judge has granted class-action status to a suit representing consumers in 18 states.
Court records indicate the company sold 3.8 million of the hard drives for desktop computers. Typically, a failure rate of less than 1 percent would be expected.
Hewlett-Packard reported a failure rate of 20 percent with DeskStar drives installed in H-P computers and attorneys say some IBM customers reported failure rates as high as 45 percent.
According to testimony in the cases, when the 15 to 75-gigabyte DeskStar drives fail, they make a clicking sound that became known to technicians as "the click of death." Data stored on the faulty drives cannot be retrieved. Trying to access the data can cause the defect to migrate to additional drives, witnesses testified.
IBM has since sold most of its hard drive business to Hitachi.
DeathStar Trying to access the data can cause the defect to migrate to additional drives, witnesses testified. 
Linear Mode
